One the co-authors of Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land is Teresa Smart (TS). Wife of Joe Hanlon, she is a fellow academic who spent several months in Zimbabwe studying land reform and talking to some of the people who have benefitted from the often violent exchange of land over the last 13 years.
TS: At Lancaster House (London 1979) Mugabe made the decision that he wasn’t going to take over the land. But it was absolutely clear that he was determined to support the small farmers in the communal areas and increase health care and education. Education in Zimbabwe is the beacon in southern Africa. The university is thriving.
After Independence, the West and the donor agencies came flocking in because Zimbabwe was very under-borrowed and people, Britain in particular, promised support and Zimbabwe was persuaded to over-borrow and to invest in agriculture, health and education and that got them into debt and then the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came in and demanded stringent measures. The backlash after the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) was huge. Subsidies and price controls for maize were taken away.”
TG: I lived there at that time and yes, there was investment in education and there was a really good relationship between Mugabe and men like Denis Norman (the country’s first Minister of Agriculture, and a previous President of the Commercial Farmers Union). Whites, blacks, people of mixed race, Asians . . .everyone thought Mugabe meant what he said about reconciliation. The post-independence honeymoon days were so promising, weren’t they?
JH: After independence, Mugabe was trying to create a genuine model multi-racial society. To do that he had to have internal support. He did all that legal eagle stuff ( observing the 10-year rule on willing buyer/willing seller as agreed upon at the Lancaster House Conference) because it was so important to gain international support. At least some of the white farmers accepted that. But I remember from the 1980s just how many whites were secretly aligned to the South African security services. Mugabe very nearly got killed by one of them, so Mugabe’s distrust for the remaining white population had some justification.
TG: But for almost 20 years there was next to no pressure on white farmers. I remember one of them saying at a closed session of the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association (ZTA) that they were lucky. Mugabe had turned his attention on ZAPU and the Ndebeles and left whites alone. The farmer said- ‘We’re treated like Royal Game by this government. As long as he’s knocking the sh*t out of them, he won’t be knocking the sh*t out of us.’ But then out of the blue came the violence of 2000. Why?
JH: The veterans of the liberation war (Chimurenga Two) were really getting fed up. They saw two things happening. First, they felt that Mugabe wasn’t sympathetic to land reform and secondly, they saw that most of the white-owned farms being acquired under the willing seller/ willing buyer set-up were going to the new Zimbabwean elite. The 1990s was also the period of Economic Structural Adjustment (ESAP) so the economy was in a crisis. The war veterans said –‘We came to Independence 20 years ago and we’ve gained nothing. We’re poorer than we were before.’ So they began to protest to Mugabe and they began to say –‘We want some of the things we fought for.’
The war veterans were organised and this was absolutely amazing. There were only about 20,000 war veterans. First of all, they went round the townships and the communal areas and said –‘If you’re unemployed, if you want land . come with us!’ Then they said –‘Wait a while and we’ll tell you what to do-where and when.’ And then came Easter 2000. It was like a blitz. People came from the townships. They’d already been organized and they occupied about 1,000 farms in just a couple of weeks. The response of the farmers was different in every case. Sometimes the war veterans would negotiate with the farmers. Sometimes the white farmers would resist. Sometimes the farm workers were on the side of the war veterans. Sometimes not.
But what happened then was this – Mugabe and his ministers started issuing a whole string of statements against what was happening and they actually went out to these farms telling people – ‘No, no! You can’t occupy white farms.’ So for several months there was a stand–off and finally a law was passed which said ‘OK. We’ll legalise the first set of occupations but no more’. And the war veterans said ‘No, that’s not acceptable. This is the Mugabe elite doing this.’ So the war veterans kept occupying farms. So they had to pass another law and that became the Fast Track Land Reform. What you see through this whole period of 2000 is the war veterans were against Mugabe, against the Zanu (PF) elite. I think that Mugabe eventually realized that there were a lot of votes at risk here and that if he was going to oppose the land reform he would lose the next election and so – good politician that he is – he totally reversed his position and then took credit for it.
TG: How much of the land has gone to Mugabe’s friends? People say a lot of the best farms went to sycophants and cronies?
JH: Some of the farms did go to cronies. Perhaps 10 percent. But there are two things to be said. One is that some of the cronies are actually growing things. Secondly, most of the land has gone to 145,000 small farmers. They’re not Mugabe’s cronies. They’ve never met Mugabe.
Next week: Sixty years ago a Rhodesian Prime Minister said: “The ultimate possessors of the land will be the people who can make the best use of it.” Joseph Hanlon and his co-authors say at long last this has happened. Has it?
Post published in: News